It’s perhaps the biggest, most controversial mystery in the cosmos. Did our Universe just come into being by random chance, or was it created by a God who nurtures and sustains all life?

The latest science is showing that the four forces governing our universe are phenomenally finely tuned. So finely that it had led many to the conclusion that someone, or something, must have calibrated them; a belief further backed up by evidence that everything in our universe may emanate from one extraordinarily elegant and beautiful design known as the E8 Lie Group.

While skeptics hold that these findings are neither conclusive nor evidence of a divine creator, some cutting edge physicists are already positing who this God is: an alien gamester who’s created our world as the ultimate SIM game for his own amusement. It’s an answer as compelling as it is disconcerting.

They are the most powerful objects in the universe. Nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Astronomers now believe there are billions of them out in the cosmos, swallowing up planets, even entire stars in violent feeding frenzies. New theoretical research into the twisted reality of black holes suggests that three-dimensional space could be an illusion. That reality actually takes place on a two-dimensional hologram at the edge of the universe.

Black holes are almost as difficult to imagine as they are to detect, but a few scientists have been up for the task over the centuries. Cambridge scholar John Michell wrote a paper in 1783 in which he hypothesized the existence of “dark stars” — stars so large and with so much gravity that light wouldn’t escape their surfaces. Most astronomers of the day thought it was an absurd notion.

Then, in 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity, providing a framework that allowed for a reinterpretation of Michell’s hypothesis. An Indian graduate student by the name of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar piggybacked on Einstein’s theories to suggest that stars of a certain size — much larger than our sun — would experience a catastrophic collapse at the end of their lives, thereby transforming the bodies into cosmic vacuum cleaners whose powerful gravity could suck all light and matter into their black maws.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says that time travel is perfectly possible — if you’re going forward. Finding a way to travel backwards requires breaking the speed of light, which so far seems impossible. But now, strange-but-true phenomena such as quantum nonlocality, where particles instantly teleport across vast distances, may give us a way to make the dream of traveling back and forth through time a reality. Step into a time machine and rewrite history, bring loved ones back to life, control our destinies.

But if we succeed, what are the consequences of such freedom? Will we get trapped in a plethora of paradoxes and multiple universes that will destroy the fabric of the universe? Einstein said that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but when physicists look at how entangled particles behave, they get stuck in a mirage in which that tenet appears not to be true.

Physicists don’t fully understand entanglement, beyond it being a relationship between particles. If you want to know what entanglement looks like, pull up a chair to an experiment that has produced it. Researchers at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis and the University of Geneva shone a laser made of photons, the basic units of light, into the crystal. When the laser’s photons hit irregularities in the crystal, single photons sometimes split into two. These daughter photons were related to one another, and to their parent photon, in how much energy they had.

You can think of the parent photon as being like a train, and the crystal like many bumps. When the train hit the bumps, it broke into two chains of cars with related directions and speeds. These daughter photons weren’t just related, but entangled. Particles are entangled if they’re related in one property but random in the rest.

Every cosmologist and astronomer agrees: our Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists are now able to take a snapshot of the Universe a mere heartbeat after its birth.

Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself – if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.

The big bang theory holds that the entire universe was once packed tightly into an unimaginably dense and tiny space, known as a “singularity.” That is, until roughly 13.7 billion years ago, when a colossal burst of energy and pressure started to give rise to entire worlds, galaxies and interstellar particles, forming the universe as we know it today.

But what brought about that big bang? Physicists are left scratching their heads at that question. Since the universe began on such a tiny level, the laws of relativity don’t fully apply. Instead, quantum theory, which deals with the lawless and bizarre world of the very small, must also be summoned.

Successfully answering the question of what existed before the big bang would require bridging the gap between the so-far mutually incompatible worlds of relativism and quantum mechanics. But even though that bridge has yet to be constructed, theories abound.

“Our universe could have either popped into existence or collided with another universe,” theoretical physicist Michio Kaku told scienceline.org. “Big Bangs happen all the time.”

Everywhere we look, life exists in both the most hospitable of environments and in the most extreme. Yet we have only ever found life on our planet. How did the stuff of stars come together to create life as we know it? What do we really mean by ‘life’? And will unlocking this mystery help us find life elsewhere?

About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system resembled a giant cloud of swirling cosmic dust, hydrogen and other gases. As with the thousands of other such clouds in our galaxy, some of these molecules began condensing, gathering and creating their own gravity.

Eventually these small clumps formed what became our sun — a star surrounded by a quickly moving, flat disc made up of the cloud’s leftovers. These leftovers also developed into our solar system’s planets, asteroid belt and other interstellar bodies.

Earth’s relative proximity to the sun meant that gases were largely burned away in those early days, leaving a rocky, metal-rich planet made from planetesimals, or smaller cosmic bodies. These same planetesimals also may have brought water and gases later. Often made of ice, they helped to plant the seeds for what would become a fertile, water-rich planet with a healthy atmosphere, capable of protecting life from the sun’s harmful rays.

Aliens almost certainly do exist. So why haven’t we yet met E.T.? It turns out we’re only just developing instruments powerful enough to scan for them, and science sophisticated enough to know where to look. As a result, race is on to find the first intelligent aliens.

But what would they look like, and how would they interact with us if we met? The answers may come to us sooner than we imagine, for one leading astronomer believes she may already have heard a hint of their first efforts to communicate.

Of all the signals received in the search for intelligent extraterrestrials, the Wow! signal is one that many people remember. And Jerry Ehman was the man who wrote it. Ehman taught astronomy and electrical engineering at Ohio State University and worked on early projects for Big Ear, a radio telescope at the university.

These telescopes collect radio waves from space. Because cosmic radio waves are weak, the telescope collecting dishes have to be large, more than three football fields long in Big Ear’s case.

Ohio State let Ehman go after cutting Big Ear’s funding. Undeterred, he came back to Big Ear as a volunteer. Two colleagues helped Ehman. Without John Kraus, who conceived of the telescope, Big Ear wouldn’t have been listening.

Robert Dixon, Kraus’s former student, designed Big Ear’s search plan, choosing the radio wavelength to listen to, and he corrected the listening to account for our galaxy’s spin. Without Dixon’s correction, Big Ear would have listened to the wrong wavelength.

Our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years, and it’s on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world’s largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is powering up.

Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of. Or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.

What are we made of? The question has rankled scientists and philosophers for millennia, and even with the amazing progress made in fields like particle physics and astronomy, we are left with only a partial answer. We know, of course, that the visible world is composed of protons, neutrons and electrons that combine to form atoms of different elements, and we know those elements are the building blocks of the planets and stars that give rise to solar systems and galaxies.

What we didn’t know until very recently, however, is that those protons, neutrons and electrons appear to form less than 5 percent of the universe, and questions remain about how these building blocks arose. If regular matter represents only a small slice of the universe, what is the rest of the universe made of?

Such questions prompted the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beneath the border between France and Switzerland. As the world’s largest particle accelerator, experts designed the LHC to recreate conditions that occurred shortly after the very foundation of universe itself. Here are a few of the mysteries scientists hope the LHC and other particle accelerators can shed light on.

What is the universe made of? If you answered stars, planets, gas and dust, you’d be dead wrong. Thirty years ago, scientists first realized that some unknown dark substance was affecting the way galaxies moved.

Today, they think there must be five times as much dark matter as regular matter out there. But they have no idea what it is – only that it’s not made of atoms, or any other matter we are familiar with. And Dark Matter is not the only strange substance in the Universe – a newly discovered force, called Dark Energy, seems to be pushing the very fabric of the cosmos apart.

The composition of the universe may seem straightforward, something you mastered back in your junior high science class – galaxies made up of planets and stars, stars made up of burning gases and dust. But this idea of the universe only includes the parts that we can see, either with the naked eye or even with powerful telescopes.

According to scientists, the visible portions of the universe account for less than 95 percent of what is actually out there in the great expanse of space. Much of the universe is made up of something we can’t see. We call this something “dark matter,” and we only discovered its existence because something else was missing.